Oral History

Columbia University’s oral-history archive was founded in 1948, by Allan Nevins, a historian who was worried that, because of the telephone, people were not writing enough down. Sixty-three years later, at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé Knowles revealed that she was pregnant with her first child and, according to publicists at Twitter, this news helped to produce a tweet-writing spike that, on the evening of August 28th, reached nearly nine thousand tweets per second—a new record. (The death of Osama bin Laden contributed to a peak of five thousand tweets per second.)

A couple of days after the V.M.A. announcement, Mary Marshall Clark, the soft-spoken director of what is now called the Columbia Center for Oral History, was sitting in a small, icy performance space, with polished concrete floors, in the west of SoHo. Clark, who anticipates some interesting years in her field as it contends with a new glut of social-media chatter, and who has an intense regard for older forms of data collection—“a face-to-face exchange, a deep exchange, an intimate conversation, sitting in the most comfortable chair”—had been invited to watch a rehearsal of a production called “A City Reimagined,” which will make use of first-person accounts, spoken by actors, drawn from the archive of interviews recorded after the World Trade Center attack by a team led by Clark and by the Columbia sociologist Peter Bearman. In the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space (which is attached to WNYC), a dapper young cellist indicated a modern relationship with his instrument by lifting it by its side with one stretched hand. Clark looked a little worried about the event to come. “I’m nervous,” she said. “Because I think I’m going to be very touched by it.”

Within a few days of 9/11, interviewers, carrying brand-new mini-disk players, started to collect stories for the Columbia archive—in some cases, by introducing themselves to strangers in Union Square. (Bearman’s advice was that, in the absence of a system of randomly selecting interviewees, one should choose the person whom one feels least inclined to interview.) A year later, the volunteers began to re-interview their subjects. “Oral history was just everywhere after 9/11,” Clark said. “Our interviews were maybe different in that they were longer life histories”—two hundred double-spaced pages, in some instances—“and we went back to people, and we were determined to capture the diversity of New York City.” Columbia now has nine hundred and fifty hours of conversations, with about six hundred people.

In SoHo, a number of actors took their seats on the stage, and then Carl Hancock Rux, a poet and playwright, read a commissioned poem in an almost unnervingly resonant voice. (“You could just listen to him saying, ‘Let’s make an omelette with mushrooms and spinach,’ ” Clark said.) And then, for almost an hour, the actors read from the archive, a paragraph or two at a time—and this was sometimes intercut with more from Rux and from Dana Leong, the cellist, who at one point was able to produce, very faintly, the sound of a screeching jet engine.

So, the words of a woman who recalled being on the point of leaving her apartment in Battery Park City: “I was all set to go and the TV suddenly turned to static, for an instant, and then resumed its normal programming. I heard a sound, what sounded like someone slamming one of the doors down the hall.”

In another passage, an office assistant, who had been on Liberty Street, said, “That’s the most frightening thing, at least to me, because that’s to show how much of a shock you’re in, when you’re running, to not even know where you’re going to run to, and nobody screaming.”

A Colombian-born, legally blind food vender had a stand in the lobby of the federal office building at 90 Church Street: “Everybody started screaming. No time to close my storeroom because everybody was screaming.” Then, later, “Oh, yes, I sleep right now much better. But in the beginning, for some reason, I start dreaming that I have no hands.”

A Pakistani-American banker: “For a month and a half afterward, I shaved every day. I hate shaving and I do have a pretty thick beard, but I took no chances. I’m even ashamed to admit this—no, actually, I’m not ashamed. I dressed as a ‘Yankee.’ I didn’t wear my black leather jacket or black jeans or black shoes. I wore shorts, my vest, my baseball cap, because I just didn’t want to stand out.”

At the end of the rehearsal, Indira Etwaroo, one of the show’s directors, came to sit with Clark, who thanked her and said, “I’m in shock that this is happening. This is the most natural thing in the world; the most natural destination of oral history is the theatre.” Clark said that she had just had a thought about the blind food vender, whose description of a recurring dream of amputation she had read many times: “Her account of her hands, I never really understood before. And now I understand it. It’s a kind of re-traumatization, of the blindness. This dream—her hands are like her eyes. It’s like becoming blind again.” ♦